The Devil's Stronghold

by Leslie Ford

  She held it out to the young police officer. But it was me she was looking at. She was looking at me and smiling.

  That was how, instead of concealing the fact that the girl who wanted to go back to Seattle, Washington, had been murdered, Mrs. Kersey succeeded in suggesting it. She could have taken the gift the Fates had handed her and kept still about it. Instead, she pressed them just one step too far. Up to that point the Los Angeles County Police had taken it for granted that death was accidental. It seems to have been Viola Kersey’s signal weakness. She never knew when to let well enough alone.

  Chapter Ten: Night prowlers

  MRS. VIOLA KERSEY was the shattered little woman helplessly appealing to the great big policeman, and making a mean suspicious harpy out of me—if indeed not actually an object of suspicion.

  “This lady won’t believe me, Captain.” She held the trailing piece of honeysuckle vine out in her fluttering white hands. “I thought this was a green cord and maybe that poor girl tripped on it. I didn’t mean to say anybody put it here on purpose, but that’s what she seems to think I meant.” She motioned at me. “It does look like a green cord, doesn’t it? And lying on the step it looked so much like one— It must have been the awful shock of seeing that poor girl down there. I must have been so shocked I was hysterical.”

  She’d said “string,” not “green cord,” and she must have had cat’s eyes or a flashlight to see it lying in the shadow of the stone step. And she wasn’t so shocked or hysterical that she hadn’t had presence of mind enough to slip the vine under the rail from where it had been over it, and strip off the leaves so that it did in fact look like a green cord. In the brief space of time my back had been turned she’d done some fast thinking and fast acting. What it added up to, however, was not what Mrs. Kersey wanted.

  Moreover, the young police officer was not a captain. He was a uniformed sergeant in charge of the radio patrol car cruising the area, who’d picked up the call relayed from the Santa Monica and Fairfax Substation of the Sheriff’s Office of Los Angeles County, which had jurisdiction. But he was nobody’s fool, and Mrs. Kersey was neither young enough, nor motherly enough, nor frail enough, for any moist-eyed fluttering helplessness to have too much effect on him.

  He took the vine out of her hand and looked at it— and her—a little oddly. He ran his flashlight along it.

  “The leaves have been stripped off,” he said soberly. “You can see where it’s peeled.”

  He swept his light over the high shrubbery at the side of the steps. A few leaves thrown over the rail had caught on it.

  “Looks like you got something, lady. Looked like accidental death. They said at the office she was roaming around stewed to the gills.”

  He turned and called down the steps to the man by the girl’s body.

  “Phil—hold everything. I’m going to call the Chief. Just leave things alone.”

  If he hadn’t been looking at Phil and had been looking at Viola Kersey he would have been a surprised young man. There was a look of startled dismay on her face as she realized what she’d done. And she didn’t like it. For one instant the appealing little woman looked for all the world like the household variety of virago who’s sweet as all get out as long as guests are present and ready to snatch the family bald-headed as soon as the door is closed. Mrs. Kersey had been too smart. If she’d left the trailing vine on top of the rail, or merely left the leaves on it, there would have been no question about her story. But she’d been desperately anxious, for some reason, to convince me that I hadn’t heard her, and her efficiency had backfired in a big way.

  I could hear her breath coming in quick, angry little jerks, and the glance she darted me was lethal. When the young sergeant turned back she’d caught hold of herself. It was not a very pleasant self. I was a little appalled that Molly McShane could ever have thought that here was a woman she could frighten off with a verbal blistering or the rock and telephone technique. It only proved what I already knew. Molly McShane was as ignorant of the nature as of the appearance of what she was up against.

  Mrs. Kersey started to shiver. “Oh, Captain, I’m so cold. I wonder if I could get my coat? I’m freezing.”

  It was cold but not that cold, and only an aspen leaf or somebody with an ague could have reacted so violently.

  “Sure,” the sergeant said. “You might as well wait in your room till we see what the Chief wants… Where are you going?”

  Mrs. Kersey had started, at a pretty fast clip, down the stairs, not back the way she’d come.

  “To my room. That’s my room down there. I was just coming back to it.”

  She drew herself up, half in hurt surprise and half in honest indignation. “And you have no right to keep me here freezing to death, young man. I had nothing to do with that girl down there. I never saw her but once in my life and that was after dinner, when she was coming out of the powder room in front of Mrs. Latham there. If you want information you’d better get it from her. It looks to me as if the girl must have been coming from somebody’s room, and hers is right there. You’d better ask her what she knows about it.”

  Mrs. Kersey was merely playing for time and privacy. I’m sure she hadn’t the foggiest idea that there was any truth in what she was saying or any possible consequences in it for herself. It was hardly even a shot in the dark, the merest distracting of attention from herself until she could get rid of the length of twine that I was sure she had on her. Of course it’s too late now, but someone, at some point, should have taught Viola Kersey the basic and canonical truth of leaving well enough alone. It was unfortunate that no one ever had. And the irony of it was that she seemed enormously pleased with herself. For the second time she looked at me and smiled, like a spoiled brat sticking out its tongue.

  I had to take it—and I was very glad I hadn’t already told the simplified form of my story, which was what I’d been planning to do when the time came. The small, harmless gaps in it, if the girl had only fallen down the stairs, would have looked like canyons full of twisting rattlesnakes the minute murder was suggested, as it now was. It was unimportant that it was accidental murder, and that if any victim had been intended it was the occupant of 31-B, now picking her way down the steps very cautiously in case a reserve string had been set up and had been overlooked by all.

  “What’s this about, ma’am?”

  The sergeant was slightly bewildered but on the alert, and his manner toward me had suffered a change. He was polite and cool.

  “I’ll be very happy to tell you all I know,” I said. “Which isn’t much. The girl was in my room. I don’t know her at all. Do you want me to make a statement now, or do I wait till somebody from Homicide gets here?”

  He didn’t know he was dealing with an old and experienced hand who’d been around murder so often, thanks to the company she kept in the Janus-faced person of Colonel Primrose and Sergeant Buck, that the kindest thing said about her was “Where there’s so much smoke there must be some fire,” and the least kind but most frequent that she was a Typhoid Mary, murder and mayhem always with her. And—like Mrs. Kersey—

  I needed time, even if I had to stand on my constitutional rights to get it.

  I also needed Colonel Primrose and Sergeant Buck. I’d have called the Colonel then and there, except that the young officer decided to use my phone to call his Chief. The guarded way he talked over the phone made it evident he thought I was being deliberately evasive, which was perfectly correct, I suppose—though I didn’t want to evade the issue as much as I wanted to sort out its various meanings and complications before we were all tied up in so many knots we could never undo them. What I should have liked to do was see Molly McShane. But that was out of the question. Any belief I had that it might be possible was dissolved when the police sergeant said a final “Okay, sir,” and put down the phone.

  “I guess you’d better stay here, ma’am, until the Chief gets out. I’ve got to see who I can round up. You’d just have to give your statement o
ver again.”

  His self-confidence seemed a little shaken, and I imagined it had been pointed out to him over the phone that he was in an exclusive hotel and he’d better be careful about shouting murder until he was sure murder was what it was.

  I closed the door after him. In the next room Mrs. Ansell, the writer, was coughing again. Across the hall there was total silence. If Gee Gee Gannon had any curiosity about what was going on outside his back windows, or any interest in what his nocturnal lady guest had barged out into, he was not showing it. Only once did I think I heard a stealthy footstep out in the hall, but I couldn’t be sure. I should have thought just natural curiosity would have made him wonder what was going on. Unless he was unconscious he couldn’t have helped knowing something was.

  Mrs. Ansell’s phone rang once. I could hear it, and her, so plainly that they might have been in my own room.

  “A blonde with her neck broken! Good Lord! Look, darling—it isn’t Miss Lana Turner by any chance, is it?”

  Then she laughed. “No, I certainly don’t wish her any bad luck, but I’m sitting around waiting to see her. No, dear—I don’t know anything about what’s going on outside. No, not yet. I was supposed to see her today, but according to the columnists she’s in Palm Springs. Maybe it’s romance, but I’m getting bored—there could be a general massacre and it wouldn’t interest me. No, I haven’t seen anything—oh, except some gal who was on my patio early this evening. She said she was hunting some dame who’d stolen her bag, or something. She was too far gone to make much sense, so if she’d fallen down the steps she’d have collapsed in a nice relaxed heap. Otherwise, darling, I’ve been in solitary. Tell me all about it in the morning. Goodbye.”

  Whether a writer saw Miss Lana Turner or not didn’t interest me, but I was vitally and personally interested in what she’d had to say about the girl on the patio. If she told the police the girl had said she was hunting some dame who’d stolen her bag, any hope of keeping the bag out of it was dim. How dim, I found out not too many minutes later. And the police didn’t hear it from Mrs. Ansell. It was from my own flesh and blood, former Navy Air Force Reserve Lieutenant William A. Latham, blissfully unconscious of the fact that he was giving his little dreamboat, and Sheep’s, a terrific shove out into the high seas with a typhoon raging toward her, a frail and tiny craft.

  Captain Crawford from the Sheriff’s Office was a quiet, soft-spoken man. I may be wrong, but all of them seemed a little grateful that it wasn’t another one of the ghastly werewolf cycle the City and County police were just beginning to be deluged with, to the drooling delight and zooming circulation of a couple of the local newspapers. At least the girl wasn’t in an open field, butchered with maniacal frenzy. She was asleep and at peace, with none of the horror and anguish and abnormality that made a Hollywood writer I know suggest, after the sixth one in fewer months, that it all looked like a publicity stunt for M. Verdoux—which ought to give the little man with the toothbrush mustache and the limber cane a moment’s pause about the meaning of comedy.

  Captain Crawford didn’t like the idea of any kind of murder, but he went at it patiently and honestly, and with none of the stupidity and bombast and rubber-hose technique that Los Angeles crime fiction writers had led me to expect. I’d got the impression that unless a gifted amateur in love with the lady got himself almost beaten to pulp and practically inside the lethal gas chamber before he unmasked the venal and brutalized constabulary, any innocent bystander they could get their hands on was a gone duck. If any county has a better run or cleaner jail, as polyglot a population or such an area to help police, as Los Angeles, I’ve never seen it. In our jail in Washington, D.C., a ten-cent store can opener has proved open sesame. Or if there’s a more colorful or dynamic and indefatigable sheriff than Jean Biscailez, or one with more pride and confidence in the men under him, I’d like to meet him, or a pathologist any better equipped or more painstakingly thorough than Dr. Newbarr. It was Dr. Newbarr who proved, in spite of Mrs. Kersey, that the girl had tripped, and proved also that it wasn’t the honeysuckle vine she’d tripped over. But that was after Captain Crawford had learned about Molly McShane’s bag.

  An officer came for me, and I went with him to the manager’s office, where Captain Crawford was talking to the people they’d rounded up. The night watchman was there, and Rose, the night maid. Mrs. Kersey was there, and a bellboy named Nat. And Bill Latham and Sheep Clarke. I looked at them with complete surprise. I thought they’d gone home a long time ago. My surprise turned to real dismay as I heard Bill Latham talking.

  “All I was trying to do was help Nat and Morry.” He nodded at the night watchman, who was sitting with his time clock strung about his neck, a long envelope clutched tightly in his hands, looking about as miserable a little man as I’ve ever seen. He had beads of perspiration on his forehead that he kept wiping off with the back of his hand, which he then wiped off on the seat of his worn pants. He looked like some unobtrusive little mole who’d taken to night watching to avoid the sunshine and was just as uncomfortable in the bright artificial light of the manager’s office.

  “She’d call a taxi and then disappear. They won’t wait out here more than five or ten minutes. I said I’d take her home in my jalopy. She wouldn’t go till she’d seen some woman she’d talked to. It was about somebody’s pocketbook. She found it in the telephone booth and gave it to this woman. The dame that owned it was making a row—said this girl had lifted it and stolen the jewels in it.”

  My heart sank. But not the police stenographer’s. He wrote with renewed energy.

  “She wanted to prove she hadn’t stolen them, so she had to find this woman. Or that’s what she thought. She was pretty tight. We tried to get her in the car, but she ducked back in the grounds. And that’s the last we saw of her. We told Morry and Rose to keep an eye out, but they didn’t find her; did you, Morry? Did you, Rose? And you didn’t see her, did you, Sheep?”

  Neither Rose nor Sheep had seen her after she left the central patio. Captain Crawford turned to the night watchman. He was trying to get a paper out of the envelope he was clutching.

  “I’m U.S.A. citizen, see?”

  He handed his passport to freedom over, keeping his hand out.

  “That’s fine, Mr. Shavin. You’re Lithuanian?”

  “American. Not Lithuanian. See—U.S.A. citizen.”

  “That’s right, Mr. Shavin.” Captain Crawford handed his paper back to him. “Put it in your pocket, and let’s hear about tonight.”

  It was hard going for the stenographer. The night watchman was voluble, now that he’d put himself on a proper footing in the sight of constituted police authority. He had tried to find the girl and almost mistaken another woman for her. It was the kind of a job to drive anybody crazy, with women always hanging around the parking area trying to waylay the stars, and getting in the grounds to find their rooms. It was enough to drive the saints crazy, trying to know who to stop and who to let alone. He would have stopped the woman he saw and got into a lot of trouble, most likely, if she hadn’t gone out the end gate and got in her own car just in time. He mopped his forehead with a blue cotton handkerchief. People didn’t like to be questioned. He’d got into a lot of trouble many times, trying to do his duty. Once he had stopped a lady star at three o’clock in the morning, trying to get out the end gate just the same way.

  He locked the end gate at half-past eleven every night, and he was not allowed to let people out that way. The lady star was visiting her husband, and the papers got hold of it because they were getting publicity for her new picture, about the two of them being separated. There was a lot of trouble. The things he could tell them! He could tell them all night about the crazy troubles he’d had. And it sounded as if he was going to, until Captain Crawford stopped him.

  “When did you go down the steps to 31-B the last time, Shavin?”

  It was twenty-five minutes past ten, Morry Shavin said, except that he went up them, not down. He was just coming to the top
of the steps when he saw Mr. Eustace Sype coming out of the hall between 101 and 102. He waited there for him, walked to his car with him, came back and finished his round, looking for the girl. On his eleven o’clock round he went along the flagstone path in front of my cottage, around to the patios in the rear, then down the steps by Mrs. Ansell’s to the end gate, which he then locked at eleven-thirty. He went back by the path in front of 31-B. It was at twelve-twenty-five that he came up the steps again, and that time he didn’t come up, because he found the girl at the bottom. He didn’t realize at first that she was dead. Hotels don’t like scandal. He had tried to move the girl, and discovered she was dead. He got the assistant manager up, and the police were called.

  “You didn’t notice the vine across the steps then?” Captain Crawford asked.

  Shavin shook his head positively. He had run up the steps to get the assistant manager, both of them had come down again, neither had noticed any vine. They were used to vines and they were both excited. Maybe there was a vine, maybe there was not.

  “Now, the woman who owned these jewels—”

  “There weren’t any jewels, Captain Crawford,” I put in.

  It seemed to me it was time to stop this nonsense or I’d find myself at the end of their blind alley, accused of receiving stolen goods.

  “That was just a joke. The girl picked the bag up in the telephone booth and gave it to me to return to the owner because she was going. It belonged to Molly McShane, and I gave it back to her.”

  “Then what was all this excitement about jewels—” Captain Crawford began.

  “It was just the state the girl was in,” I said. “I doubt if she was a very reliable reporter. I’m sure Miss McShane can tell you what happened. All I know is, the girl was on my patio while you were in the room, Sheep. I’m not very clear about the time, but it must have been almost eleven when she left my room, or a little after that.”